“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Einstein.
Firing creativity and innovation
When you want to make a change in life, be it at work or at home, knowing where to start can be a challenge. When you want to ignite your creative spark and come up with groundbreaking, exciting and innovative ideas, which is more important, imagination or knowledge?
How existing knowledge can block new ideas
When faced with the challenge of finding new ways to do something that’s very familiar, our existing knowledge can hold us back. When you’ve already completed a task, like brushing your teeth, thousands of times before, it can be difficult to imagine how the task could be completed differently. When we’re engrossed in familiar tasks and situations we can even fail to register new and unexpected things that are clearly within our field of vision. A classic example of this is the following video, watch the ball closely and count how many times it is passed between players wearing white t-shirts.
Did you notice anything unusual about one of the players? This phenomenon is known as inattentional blindness , and is a psychological inability to see something unexpected that is plainly in our sight.
Taking a fresh look at the familiar
One of the key techniques for developing creative thinking and innovation is practicing the ability to view the familiar in different ways. So what practical tools can be used to fire creativity and innovation?
One great tool that enables us to look at the familiar through a fresh lens is a technique created way back in the 1950’s by Professor Robert Crawford, known as the Attribute Listing technique. You can use this technique by following these three simple steps:
Attribute Listing Technique for creativity and innovation
- List the attributes
Take the object, concept or item that you’re working on and list as many attributes as you can. So, for example, an envelope has attributes of ‘paper’, it ‘holds something’ etc.
You might want to reduce the object to its separate parts and examine the attributes of each part in turn. So the envelope can be further reduced to the attributes of paper, glue, folds. The paper can the be broken down further and more attributes describes, such as ‘large’, ‘smooth’, ‘expensive’, ‘coloured’, ‘strong’ etc.
- Consider the importance of each attribute
Examine the significance and value of each attribute by asking what it provides or offers. For every attribute, ask ‘What is the real value provided?’ and ‘what does this give us’? You may even find some negative attributes during this part of the exercise.
An example might be that the envelope has the positive attribute of being light and flexible but it may also have the negative attribute of being weak or insubstantial. Another negative attribute might be that the envelope can only be re-used a limited number times.
- Modify attributes
Next, choose the key attributes and establish ways in which they might be modified. Examine how you can increase value, establish new value and eliminate or reduce negative attributes.
With our envelope example, we could modify the negative attribute of the paper being weak by changing the material the envelope is made of into something more durable, like thin neoprene. Using thin neoprene could also make the envelope much more reusable.
Attribute Listing works by reducing the problem to its smallest components and examining each component in a way that, ordinarily, we would never do. When we look at a familiar problem, with this fresh approach, we gain a new insight and perspective that leads to creativity and innovation.
For more great tips on developing creativity, see Julie Burstein’s Ted Talk:
